Today, 21 and a half million Americans are unemployed or underemployed—about twice as many as six years ago, according to NPR. Work-force participation, a fancy term for the number of Americans either working or looking for work, has dropped to “the lowest level since the malaise of the late 1970’s,” an era when far fewer women were working, according to MSNBC.

Yes, the unemployment rate dropped last month—but only because so many people simply gave up looking for work. The dirty little secret is that after only four weeks of not looking for a job, an unemployed worker stops being counted. So far as the jobless numbers are concerned, that person ceases to exist. But, of course, they do exist and continue to be counted in other, troubling statistics:

More than 16 million Americans have been added to the food stamps rolls since Barack Obama was first elected—a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio. More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.

The last president who saw poverty at this level was LBJ, and it moved him to launch the war on poverty.

An economy inflicting this much pain is a national crisis that should dominate discussion as we marshal our collective attention. Instead, we’re talking about guns and gay marriage. In a country where hunger should be a national disgrace, we spend more time talking about a skinny billionaire’s efforts to stop the fat from getting fatter.

John Edwards is a lying lizard, but he was on to something when he talked about two Americas. The larger America, by far, is made up of men and women living paycheck to paycheck or without one, struggling like never before. For too many, the grinding economy has gone on for so long it is becoming the only America they remember.

The other, much smaller America is thriving. The stock market is hitting all-time highs, Silicon Valley keeps coining new twenty-something billionaires, and seven out of the ten wealthiest counties in America are now in the Washington, D.C. area.

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